Wednesday, March 21, 2012

How does the United Nations view social progress?

I have previously expressed the view on this blog that if
progress is to have any meaning from a public policy perspective it must mean
movement toward a good society or movement from a good society to a better
society. The improvement of society can, of course, be referred to as ‘social
progress’.

When I did an internet search on ‘social progress’, the
second item listed was the United Nations Declaration on Social Progress and Development adopted in 1969. This Declaration stands in stark contrast to the resolution
sponsored by Bhutan and adopted in July last year calling on Member States ‘to
pursue public policy steps that would better capture the importance of pursuing
happiness and well-being in development’.

As might be expected, the 1969 UN declaration begins by
asserting the value of humans and the rights of everyone to enjoy the fruits of
social progress. Without attempting to define social progress it then goes on
to assert that social progress requires the ‘full utilization of human
resources’ and giving everyone the ‘right to work’. The declaration then
proclaims the importance of economic growth to social progress:

‘The rapid expansion of national income and wealth and their
equitable distribution among all members of society are fundamental to all
social progress, and they should therefore be in the forefront of the
preoccupations of every State and Government’.

I guess the authors were trying to make the point that growth
in productivity and technological progress are central to meeting the
aspirations of people to improve their living standards. In the preamble to ‘Part
II Objectives’ it is asserted that ‘progress and development shall aim at the continuous
raising of the material and spiritual standards of living of all members of
society’. The recognition of spiritual needs is interesting, but the authors
gave no hint of what they meant by ‘spiritual standards of living’. Considered
as a whole, the document has the appearance of having been drafted by economic
planners to foster greater recognition of their own importance.

Perhaps I should view the UN Declaration on Social Progress
as a product of its times and be glad that the UN has moved on. I can’t help
feeling, however, that the wording of the document is particularly crass, even given
views that were prevalent at the time the document was written.

If the authors had wanted to emphasize the aspirations that
people have for improvement of their material living standards it would not
have been hard for them to come up with an appropriate definition of social
progress in those terms. For example, they could have written a definition,
along the lines I have drafted below, based on words used by Ludwig von Mises, leader of the Austrian
School of economic thought, in his book ‘Theory and History’, which was
published in 1957:

Most humans want to live and to prolong their lives; they
want to be healthy and to avoid sickness; they want to live comfortably and not
to exist on the verge of starvation. Advance toward these goals means progress,
the reverse means retrogression.

If the authors had set their sights a little higher they
might even have been able to benefit from the thoughts of another famous
Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek:

‘In one sense, civilization is progress and progress is
civilization. The preservation of the kind of civilization that we know depends
on the operation of forces which, under favourable conditions, produce
progress. If it is true that evolution does not always lead to better things,
it is also true that without the forces which produce it, civilization and all
we value – indeed almost all that distinguishes man from beast – would neither
exist nor could long be maintained’(‘Constitution
of Liberty’, 1960, 39-40).

Hayek saw progress as a process of learning, the cumulative
growth of knowledge which when achieved becomes available for the benefit of
all. He wrote:

‘It is through this free gift of the knowledge acquired by
the experiments of some members of society that general progress is made
possible, that the achievements of those who have gone before facilitate the
advance of those who follow’ (p 43).

2 comments:

Thanks a lot for posting this very interesting blog article. I found this slogan very good which says that Progress is Civilization & Civilization is Progress. We really need a Better Society than just a Good Society.Coal Technology is an example of progress in industrialization.

Emancipation

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